Apologies i didnt fully explain,

The config of the gallery works fine and can write as required, but the pictures I'm adding to the gallery come from a read only folder. I understand the thumbnails are added to the _/data gallery etc can i create these else where and just copy them across?

Would the gallery pic them up on a sync on the folders?

Is there any addons or scripts that i could use?

thanks

JJones2020:

Yes, you can create the thumbnails off-line and upload them to the _data...gallery using ftp or whatever you wish.

I do this, and it seems to work fine. By doing this, the first visitor to a gallery doesn't have to wait for the thumbnails to be generated.

I don't think the sync cares if these thumbnails exist or not. I believe that the thumbnails are only read (or generated on-the-fly if they don't exist) while a user is looking at that gallery.

In configuration \ options \ photo sizes, you can select the thumbnail sizes you wish to use.

Below are the sizes pre-defined in piwigo:

Name    post    X     Y     min required
SQUARE    -sq    120    120    Yes
THUMB    -th    144    144    Yes
XXSMALL    -2s    240    240   
XSMALL    -xs    432    324   
SMALL    -sm    576    432   
MEDIUM     -me    792    594    Yes
LARGE    -la    1008    756   
XLARGE    -xl    1224    918   
XXLARGE    -xx    1656    1242   

Note: internal to piwigo, these are noted as derivatives. This list of sizes can be found in ...\piwigo\include\derivative_std_params.inc.php.

Note that 3 sizes are the minimum required. I'm not sure where the -cu_e520x360.jpg comes from; it may be generated by the mobile version of piwigo.

Note that the square thumbnail is square - the image is cropped to be square. For all but square, the dimensions are maximum, so for large, a portrait image will be 756 pixel tall, and something less than 756 pixels wide.

So, depending on how you have chosen your photo sizes, you'll need at least 3 thumbnail, and possibly the -cu* ones as well.

Note: if you are creating these manually, make sure that they are all properly rotated before using FTP to upload them. For example, a portrait image from a modern camera is often stored in what appears to be landscape mode with an internal EXIF tag 'Orientation' that tells the photo display program to rotate the image to portrait mode. When I generated/ftp thumbnails without rotating them first, they displayed very poorly in piwigo (a portrait thumbnail was forced into a landscape size distorting the image severely).

As for what I use, I decided to teach myself python and wrote a script to generate my thumbnails. It is a work in progress, and is currently buggy, but I'm slowly making progress on this project. It is not currently ready for anyone else to use/try - sorry.

Note: I'm a new user to piwigo, and believe the above is correct, but make no guarantees that my understanding is correct. I'm still learning too.